| Owen Sheppard and the editor are right to draw attention to the stasis (no change) at Charing Cross Hospital Urgent Care Centre, Hammersmith Hospital UCC and Parsons Green UCC. The budgets for these UCCs have been taken over by London Region NHS and redirected "temporarily" to Covid-19. But Covid-19 is now dying out. We are witnessing yet more unannounced closures and centralisation of power. On 29th April, near the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sir David Sloman, Director of NHS London Region, wrote to the heads of all London's Integrated Care Systems (as yet not legally recognised as NHS bodies) demanding their plans to permanently adopt many of the changes which they had temporarily made to meet the Covid-19 challenge. That is the way that the NHS and Govs force through change: they "seize the moment". |